[media-credit name=”” align=”alignright” width=”150″][/media-credit] Gary Flakes was convicted of being an accessory to murder in the 1997 shotgun slayings of two teenage boys. He’s now running for City Council. The Gazette

Wil Alston, who since July has led the communications department for Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, announced today he was stepping down from that position to take over communications for the city’s finance department.

“I am not a 25-year-old any more,” Alston said. “I am an older cat. I wanted to do something with a more strategic focus. I talked to the mayor right after he got back from Japan. We started wrestling around with what that looked like.”

Alston and Hancock are longtime friends. Alston said the mayor created a position at the finance department, which previously did not have a person in charge of communications.

Alston said he will be working messaging how the city plans to implement recommendations from a structural financial task force that has been meeting for a year to help the city find a permanent fix to its perpetually unbalanced budget.Read more…

On Monday, Seattle’s City Council joined other major cities across the country — including San Francisco and Portland, Ore. — that have imposed bans on plastic grocery bags, leaving this reporter to wonder if such a ban could occur in Denver or elsewhere along the Front Range.

Seattle City Council voted to ban plastic bags in the city by July. Colorado's legislature rejected a statewide ban but a few Colorado communities have either banned or are considering limits for plastic bags, which environmentalists call an irksome pollutant.

Already, a handful of Colorado communities have enacted bans on bags or fees for their use, including in Aspen and Telluride.

In October, Boulder’s City Council discussed either a ban or a fee in a study session to update the city’s Zero Waste Master Plan. No decisions were made and the council wanted more time to study the issue, which may come up for vote next year. At the time of the October session, it appeared the majority of council was leaning toward a fee for bag use.

Unlike most appointments, the council must approve the chief’s contract. A charter change in 2003 required an external candidate for police chief to be hired via contract and it also must be approved by the council.

Medical marijuana advocates are joking when they say they want to use an image of potential Denver Police Chief Robert White from a satirical e-mail being passed around showing the candidate for police chief dressed up as a marijuana superhero.

Medical marijuana advocates jokingly say they want to adopt the caricature of Chief Robert White as Captain Cannabis for their organization.

“Obviously we’re kidding about making ‘Captain Cannabis’ the mascot for the medical marijuana industry in Colorado, but we’re not kidding around when it comes to protecting the rights of legal medical marijuana residents,” said Vincent Palazzotto, director of the Medical Marijuana Assistance Program of America in a press release issued today.

White, whose contract must be approved by Denver’s city council, says he has never used drugs and doesn’t even drink coffee.

In 1985, White had a false-positive reading for marijuana in a drug test for a job promotion in Washington, D.C. The test was later confirmed to be negative. White later sued the police union for defamation for releasing the information about the drug test, and unsuccessfully sued a television station for reporting on the incident.

After today’s appointment of Penny May to head the Department of Human Services, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock now has three more positions to fill in his 15-member cabinet as he approaches his 100th day in office next week.

Penny May

Hancock still must appoint a police chief, manager of public works and a manager of community planning and development. Last week, he made a flurry of appointments, including the heads of parks and recreation and environmental health.

May, who was interim DHS manager, will earn $136,474 as head of the department that provides a variety of assistance to Denver residents from helping those in financial need to protecting those from abuse and neglect.

One of the strangest press releases in a long time came across our desk over the weekend — outrage about the use of a puppet in a political campaign.

Backers of Initiative 300 — Denver’s paid sick leave ballot measure — took to the streets recently with a person dressed up as “Sick Rick,” a walking germ factory.

Sick Rick was seen in front of Snooze, a popular Denver breakfast restaurant, and was recorded by a patron on a cell phone cameras. On the video, one of Sick Rick’s handlers can be heard saying, “Let’s infect some healthy diners. Let’s do it.”

The anti-Initiative 300 folks immediately issued a press release, demanding an apology “after the group actively tried to scare customers away from shops and restaurants using a puppet they created to attack small businesses.” The press release says that the initiative supporters are being funded by out-of-state interests.

“Germs stay home and our families are protected,” says the new advertisement supporting Denver’s Initiative 300 that was released today.

The initiative on Denver’s Nov. 1 ballot — backed by unions and health and restaurant workers — says private employees and city workers would earn up to 72 hours of paid sick leave a year, scaled to the size of the workplace.

Joey Bunch has been a reporter for 28 years, including the last 12 at The Denver Post. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry.